Physicists, do you feel left out? Some nobody biologist from the Middle-of-Nowhere, Minnesota gets featured in a crackpot movie, but all you get is incoherent dumpster-diving schizophrenics making tirades about your work, and never anybody who has heard of venture capital? Rejoice! Your loons are getting more professional, too!

Feature Length Doc “Einstein Wrong” Looking for Executive Producer

Two Oscar Winning Distributors Wanting a Rough Cut

LONG BEACH, Calif, October 16, 2007 – Bootstrap Productions is currently
looking for an executive producer for it’s feature-length documentary
“Einstein Wrong – The Miracle Year” due out in 2008. The documentary is
about a suburban house wife who takes on the icon of 20th century physics
to see if in fact relativity is wrong. Shot over the past 3 years, the
film has two Oscar-winning distributors interested in the project. The
film is directed by David de Hilster who has invested 13 years studying
scientists and their efforts to show Einstein wrong. It is co-produced
and edited by Andrea Tucker, and Nick Tamburri and is due out in
2008. For more info, go tohttp://investing.einsteinwrong.com.

I hope they get that financial backing soon, because I think it would be perfect if this movie came out in February 2008, and went head-to-head with Expelled.

This could be almost as bad as that dreadful What the bleep do we know? movie. By the way, you can search all over their website, and you won’t find anything that explains what Einstein got wrong, how they figured it out, or what alternative they propose. The similarity to Intelligent Design creationism is perfect.

Comments

And you see people studying Physics for years and years, or studying Molecular Biology… Why? Thanks to the truthiness concept, you can refute Dalton, Darwin, Einstein or Planck very easily. You don’t need boring formulas, annoying lab work, hardous reading of previous literature. The only thing you need is a “coherent” discurse based in some “sacred text” or “common sense” conceptions. The way to crankiness is very wide in those days.

The general public could understand relativity a whole lot better if they actually got a science education. Uninformed comments from a large number of uneducated people are worthless against the informed statements of educated people.

Does that sound horribly elitist? Well, so be it. Let it be proclaimed from the mountaintops that I support elitism: in fact, I love my own elite so much that I think everyone should belong to it.

engineers don’t use it

Bzzzt. GPS. Thanks for playing.

there is a growing number of physicists and scientists finding fundemental problems with relativity

No, there isn’t. (String theory starts with special relativity as a basic assumption; it’s the study of the relativistic dynamics of quantum strings, with supersymmetry added if you want to have super-strings. Loop Quantum Gravity, the only other idea which is anything close to a respectable plan for quantizing gravity, includes the idea of “Lorentz violation”: look very carefully in the right places, and — maybe — you’ll spot a circumstance in which relativity isn’t working quite as expected. That’s not a definitive prediction, however, and LQG theorists only expect departures from Einsteinian predictions in extreme circumstances. It’ll be harder to check for those divergences than it was to check Einstein’s divergence from Newton; that’s progress for you!)

Surely it’s feasible that an unlettered individual, noodling about in the scant amount of free time she has, to deconstruct a theoretical framework that’s been successfully supported with countless independent observations of predicted results.

Apparently that’s what a lot of people think — this movie is only feeding a preexisting appetite. A repetition of the popular “judge for yourself” mantra on the website’s FAQ signals that the producers are tapping into the romantic ideal of the American maverick — the “little guy” outsmarts the big guy, because what really counts isn’t smarts, it’s hearts.

Month ago or so I got into a debate with the woman manning a Young Earth Creationism booth at my county fair, and she seriously told me that she was capable of analyzing and judging abstracts in biology journals because she was “a mom who homeschools.” When I told her that didn’t give her expertise, she rolled her eyes in derision. Of course it did. She was a concerned mother. And a Christian.

I think two things are going on here in our culture: the aforementioned American myth that anyone can do anything if they only have sincerity and spunk; and the religious myth that the universe has been set up for us to provide important answers to anyone who has sincere faith and spunky humility. If the entire substructure of the cosmos is a Higher Consciousness with values akin to our own, then the universe is friendly. If you want to figure things out it’s more important to do your spiritual work than rely on intelligence, effort, and book learning. Wisdom comes from above, to those who are attuned to it. Ask and ye shall receive.

To play the devil’s advocate, why should scientists be the only ones to debunk Einstein, when (cf. the Courtier’s reply) anyone can question theology?

Since theology need not be predicated on anything resembling reality, no previous knowledge of the field is required, and therefore anyone attempting a theological statement becomes, de facto, a theologist.

For a demonstration of this, I ask you to make up any untestable claim and determine whether it’s less or more true than anything any ‘real’ theologist’s theological claims.

No, it was in Wisconsin. And it’s unlikely it was FTK — there are plenty of Christian YEG homeschool mom to go around.

What drove her nuts was that I wouldn’t get into the science arguments. She and the guy with her kept asking “Ok, you tell me what you consider to be the best evidence for evolution and I’ll try to answer it.” I told them no. Although I’d done some evolution debates in the past I decided to take a different tack. None of us was a biologist or had a background in evolutionary theory, and she wanted me to ignore the consensus of expert opinion on the matter and play into a role. Let’s all talk over our heads about things we don’t understand fully and look for holes in each other’s arguments. And let’s assume that a Major Conspiracy on behalf of virtually all scientists across virtually all disciplines is a legitimate possibility, okay? That assumption isn’t a big deal.

That’s what’s called a game. It’s dishonest, and I told them they were exploiting people and fooling themselves. Science isn’t done by inexperienced laymen who’ve looked at some books and websites and think they’ve now got enough knowledge to overturn established theories and argue on common ground with actual experts. Bottom line, they’re not just peddling creationism: they’re peddling arrogance. That mom was tricking people by pretending that’s how science is done — someone at a booth in the county fair can and should be taken seriously and her arguments weighed carefully. She was trying to find those more ignorant than herself.

No. Science is not religion. You can’t just feel your way to truth. If you want to go against a mainstream view — or any view — you actually have to know what you’re talking about, not just look and sound and talk like you do good enough to pass at the county fair.

But a clock running slower doesn’t mean time slowed down. Time is time is time is time is time. It goes on with or without our watches moving close to the speed of light or not or whether or not your clock is the coolest clock in the universe and way up in outer space.

Oy, gevalt.

All clocks run slow. It doesn’t matter whether they’re based on cesium atoms, a swinging pendulum, the growth of cancer cells or your cousin Earl counting “One Mississippi, two Mississippi. . .”

I don’t think we are left out, especially not by creationists that would love to support their YEC tent occupants by removing the relativity obstruction to a 6000 year old universe. But biology is chosen as the presumed “soft” target in the Wedge. (Hah! First lesson in strategy: never reveal a strategy. Second lesson in strategy: make sure of your intelligence…, um, now I see why they have problems.)

engineers don’t use it

More fundamentally than GPS, what will we do without magnetism?

Maybe they don’t appreciate that when we derive the Lorentz force directly from EM theory we use the covariant formulation that fundamentally unite E and M forces. Magnetism is such a cool low-velocity relativity effect, we just aren’t used to think of it as such.

Then we will have to disuse X-ray tubes, whose photons are generated by Bremsstrahlung with relativistic corrections at higher energies.

We would have to close down our nuclear reactors. Which btw waters tantalizingly glow with Bremsstrahlung as well.

I guess we should leave interplanetary missions and accelerator technology alone. We wouldn’t want to confuse such esoteric activities with, you know, what engineers do.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re based on cesium atoms

And you can make a very simple gedanken experiment clock by bouncing a photon between two parallel perfect mirrors. How can they when get a difference between time slowing down (the photon bouncing less frequently) and the clock slowing down (less frequent bounces recorded)?

Sorry, Skeptico, it’s not a spoof. David de Hilster has been pushing Autodynamics since … well, I argued extensively with him on Usenet sci.physics in the late 80’s or early 90’s. One of the “features” of this so-called theory is the nonexistence of the neutrino. Given that, at the time (and again today), I was working on a particle physics experiment measuring the interaction properties of the neutrino, I was pretty sure they existed. I explained, patiently at first, less so later, how they were produced and how they were measured and how we were sure that what we saw wasn’t something else. In the end he demanded that I give him copies of our data; seeing as it was just a bunch of bits unless you understood how to interpret the data-aquisition readout, etc (in 60-bit Cyber format!) he wasn’t going to get far with that. In the end he never did tell me where to ship him the 8mm tapes.

Yes, Sastra, de Hilster is the king of the “little guy outsmarts those silly PhD’s” ’cause they’re just in it for the money not the knowledge and are suppressing the real thinkers.

Wrote his own imdb entry. Correlating this with his movie web page he has the following cast:

Lead:
Patricia de Hilster [ mother ]

Main:
Robert de Hilster [ father ],
Doris de Hilster [ wife ]

Supporting:
Geoff Hunter,
Michael de Hilster,
Addie de Hilster,
Luanda de Hilster,
David de Hilster [ himself ]

Wow, what modesty to list himself last.

He quote mines like a fundie, completely misinterpreting what is said. For instance, off a “science watchdogs” webpage he has:

[from a press release about a proposed neutrino experiment]
“Once the lab is built, initial research would center on neutrinos, believed to hold the key to understanding how the universe developed.”

Notice the word “believed”. Kudos to the journalists who at least did not lie about the fact that neutrinos are not 100% proven or 100% accepted as needed in the model of today’s understanding of the universe.

[bolding his]. Now a simpleton with basic understanding of English grammar would know that “believe” modifies the “hold the key” and says nothing about the existence (or not) of the objects themselves.

I never quite understood about his insane need to not believe in neutrinos. I think it follows from neutrinos are needed to balance energy and momentum in radioactive decay under special relativity (SR). Thus if they exist that serves as evidence that SR is right, and if SR is right then Autodyanmics, his hobby horse, must be wrong (being that it is completely incompatible with SR … or even Galilean, i.e. everyday slow moving, low energy physics).

So not only is he smarter than Einstein (who couldn’t be all that smart since he got the “I after E” rule wrong twice in his name), he’s also smarter than Newton and Galileo. I suspect that he was a contributing factor to the creation of the crackpot index developed by John Baez in the early 90’s. Check it out, it’s physics oriented only because the famous scientists mentioned are all physicists, but if you dropped Darwin in there you’d probably find it quite suitable for classifying Creationists/IDers.

I think two things are going on here in our culture: the aforementioned American myth that anyone can do anything if they only have sincerity and spunk; and the religious myth that the universe has been set up for us to provide important answers to anyone who has sincere faith and spunky humility.

Also, it’s official: I also love Sastra!

Chris Noble wrote:

A trifecta!

Ha!

Crap… That is such a good word. I really dropped the ball on this one. I just told him he sounded like an “ignorant, uneducated, top of the bottom of the barrel creationist”. I admit… trifecta really has a lot more flare ๐

There definitely is a crank law of attraction. The ability to overestimate your ability and understanding in one field predicts with extremely high precision the probability that you are a crank in a completely different field.

Or… “Stupid is as stupid does”, lol.

No seriously. I think Sastra had a good take on take on it. Except when I’m feeling dark I think it’s a “war” on science.

Heh! David de Hilster. Look, y’all, Nostradamus only missed his name by two letters!

I thought Nostradamus wrote “Hister”, so one letter? Or is Nostradamus’s handwriting illegible as usual?

I officially love you now!

Just to generate some jealousy: I have the elitism quote in my quotation collection, dated from March 19th this year. Somehow I forgot to add an author attribution, though.

There definitely is a crank law of attraction. The ability to overestimate your ability and understanding in one field predicts with extremely high precision the probability that you are a crank in a completely different field.

Of course. Entirely logical. If the Evil Mad Scientists Conspiracy can cover up the Truth in one field, what stops them from doing the same in all others?

You might want to use <br /> on The Panda’s Thumb for the same function.

What for? It’s the same function. Right?

is needed here. But not on PT. So much for standards.

I learned the hard way that Scienceblogs requires <s> while the PhyloCode forum requires <strike> — in each, the alternative does not work.

Bremsstrahlung

You keep that in German? Interesting. Would “braking radiation” be too ambiguous when said aloud?

BTW, Gedankenexperiment is a single word, too.

Also, almost EVERY documentary is done by people who are not experts in the field.

That’s why we cringe at them so much. Go over to the Dinosaur Mailing List archives, search for any documentary about dinosaurs or any other extinct animals, and watch people cringe. The errors number in the hundreds.

without even considering the possibility that he could be wrong.

Dude… we’ve all contemplated the possibility long and often. It just happened to turn out to be wrong in each case. Look at a photo of a Hubble Deep Field and behold the Einstein Cross, the Einstein Ring, and lots and lots of Einstein Arcs. Look with your own eyes. And then try to explain what you see by any other way than the theory of relativity. Have fun!

Einstein’s theory of relativity where mass is “Supposed” to increase, time is “supposed” to slow down, and lenght is “supposed” to contract

All these effects have been observed again and again.

Just because you haven’t seen the research doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Heh! David de Hilster. Look, y’all, Nostradamus only missed his name by two letters!

I thought Nostradamus wrote “Hister”, so one letter? Or is Nostradamus’s handwriting illegible as usual?

I officially love you now!

Just to generate some jealousy: I have the elitism quote in my quotation collection, dated from March 19th this year. Somehow I forgot to add an author attribution, though.

There definitely is a crank law of attraction. The ability to overestimate your ability and understanding in one field predicts with extremely high precision the probability that you are a crank in a completely different field.

Of course. Entirely logical. If the Evil Mad Scientists Conspiracy can cover up the Truth in one field, what stops them from doing the same in all others?

You might want to use <br /> on The Panda’s Thumb for the same function.

What for? It’s the same function. Right?

is needed here. But not on PT. So much for standards.

I learned the hard way that Scienceblogs requires <s> while the PhyloCode forum requires <strike> — in each, the alternative does not work.

Bremsstrahlung

You keep that in German? Interesting. Would “braking radiation” be too ambiguous when said aloud?

BTW, Gedankenexperiment is a single word, too.

Also, almost EVERY documentary is done by people who are not experts in the field.

That’s why we cringe at them so much. Go over to the Dinosaur Mailing List archives, search for any documentary about dinosaurs or any other extinct animals, and watch people cringe. The errors number in the hundreds.

without even considering the possibility that he could be wrong.

Dude… we’ve all contemplated the possibility long and often. It just happened to turn out to be wrong in each case. Look at a photo of a Hubble Deep Field and behold the Einstein Cross, the Einstein Ring, and lots and lots of Einstein Arcs. Look with your own eyes. And then try to explain what you see by any other way than the theory of relativity. Have fun!

Einstein’s theory of relativity where mass is “Supposed” to increase, time is “supposed” to slow down, and lenght is “supposed” to contract

All these effects have been observed again and again.

Just because you haven’t seen the research doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

another side of a story where Einstein and relativity are not what they seem

So what do we care if Einstein wasn’t what he seems if the theory has passed all current tests? You are like the creationists who thinks painting Darwin in a different color would affect the science he originated.

But hey, dogmatists think alike.

Bremsstrahlung

You keep that in German?

So? Do you want to say lumen desiit in biology? ๐

although the eerie blue glow of a nuclear reactor is cherenkov radiation.

D’oh! Thanks, I felt I missed something. Maybe I should try to get my own reactor someday.

Ironically it makes my point stronger, as cherenkov radiation is a direct relativistic effect.